The Great Capitulation

With tech CEOs and other elites bowing to Mr Trump, the air is going out of the old liberal order

- MICHELLE GOLDBERG

At a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, Donald Trump described recent visits from Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple, Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, and other tech barons. "In the first term, everyone was fighting me," he said. "In this term, everyone wants to be my friend." For once, he wasn't exaggerating.

Since Mr Trump won re-election—this time with the popular vote—many of the most influential people in America seem to have lost any will to stand up to him as he goes about transforming America into the sort of authoritarian oligarchy he admires. Call it the Great Capitulation.

Following January 6, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder, suspended Mr Trump's account. But last month at Mar-a-Lago, The Wall Street Journal reported, Mr. Zuckerberg stood, hand on heart, as "the club played a rendition of the national anthem sung by imprisoned" January 6 defendants. (It's not clear if Mr. Zuckerberg knew what he was listening to.) He's pledged a million-dollar donation to Mr. Trump's inauguration, as did the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos' company Amazon, which will also stream the inauguration on its video platform.

After Time magazine declared Mr. Trump "Person of the Year," the publication's owner, the Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, wrote on X, "This marks a time of great promise for our nation." The owner of The Los Angeles Times, the billionaire pharmaceutical and biomedical entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, killed an editorial criticizing Mr. Trump's cabinet picks and urging the Senate not to allow recess appointments.